Whilst sitting in the US Engage conference talk about Innovation Suite and after using the initial BETA it occurred to me immediately how well this new technology fitted what we have been doing at KTSL over the last 2 years. Namely extending the BMC platform to be able to take advantage of the visual and integration components available within Java and outside of the Remedy toolset. We approached BMC and working with BMC came up with the idea of hosting a UK Innovator House similar the to one held in the US but this time with customers present and with a fixed requirement from those customers. From this, the idea of the UK Innovation House came to fruition.

The house was hosted over 3 days in the Surrey Hills in a quiet country location with a house able to sleep all of the required participants. The customers were chosen because they too have had a similar vision to extend the platform and one of the customers, Unilever, have actively been extending and laying HTML 5 User Interfaces over Remedy already. Unilever and IBM attended the house, with Unilever providing a Systems Developer and a Solutions Analyst. IBM sent a Systems Developer. KTSL sent 3 Systems Developers and they all worked with 2 BMC representatives and a member of the US house.

The solutions analyst at the house outlined the business process and the requirement. Simply they have multiple alert systems and they wanted one view of this external data from the Operations Bridge. Alerts marked as ‘down’ need to cut Incidents straight away but other alerts which could be an Incident need a manual verification. The requirement was to allow the Operations Bridge one view and a quick way of creating the Incident or ignoring the alert. This was done based on the severity of the alert.

The application was ideal as a showcase because we needed integrations into the underlying alerting tool (in this case Omnibus) and we also wanted links to the CMDB models. We used the development capabilities to not only use direct REST Webservices to get the data but use a table and a graphical javascript display for the graphical element. The suite allowed us to build something quickly which would have needed extensive customisation previously.

The real plus points of the suite were the speed and the scalability of it and allowing both the developers but also the solutions analyst to play a key role in the development. It also allows you to develop additional features yourself and really make use of industry standard user interface techniques alongside the integration capabilities of the BMC technology stack. Longer term, taking this as a base and extending it into the BMC Panama application as well building up a set of core components for the Suite will make this a industry leading and powerful development platform.

The house was a perfect location for the developers to thrive, with the constant interaction and the focused goal giving a much better opportunity than a training course or a Q & A session. By working through the requirements it really gave a focus to not just 'learning' the tool but 'using' the tool which is much more valuable. From a KTSL perspective we intend to leverage this by building applications both with our customers but also for ourselves over the coming months. Allowing us to leverage our work over the last 2 years but now inside the Suite. Using Innovation Suite will become a core part of the KTSL technology products alongside other exciting new technologies we intend to invest in over the next year.